Mountain Ghosts

blessmycottonsocks

blessmycottonsocks

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We've had fascinating threads on railway ghosts, sea-faring ghosts, aviation ghosts, underground/tunnel ghosts and last night, because I'm reading a novel featuring deaths on Mont Blanc, I got thinking about mountaineers who surely must have had many spooky experiences.

Sure enough, there is plenty of reading material out there.
Hardly surprising, given the number of deaths that have occurred on the highest peaks over the years and coupled with the very real medical effects at high altitude of oxygen starvation, hypothermia, snow-blindness and exhaustion.

This was the account I read before going to sleep last night:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/75567/ghost-stories-worlds-tallest-peaks

Furthermore, the many perfectly-preserved cadavers on Everest, some in eerily lifelife poses, make it an extraordinarily creepy place.

Please share any of your favourite mountain ghost tales here!
 
I like that link. I'd never really thought about ghosts on mountains, although considering the death toll on many peaks it wouldn't be surprising if they were haunted.
 
Broken spectres as contributing to the likelihood to see something....
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
I found something rather unsettling about the way Mallory's weather-bleached cadaver was treated by these mountaineers:


Many more tragic and eerie pics on this site:

http://sometimes-interesting.com/2011/06/29/over-200-dead-bodies-on-mount-everest/

Regular climbers treat the corpses as grotesque milestones. How creepy is that?
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It certainly is creepy, but it gets creepier: if you click through from the article in the OP to this BBC link, it turns out the corpses are disappearing... The notorious Green Boots, for example, is no longer in the cave named after him. No-one is entirely sure who is behind this,
although the most likely candidate is China, who wants to be seen as an appropriate guardian for the mountain.
 
This story seems a bit tame compared to the real life horrors of Everest mentioned above and it's probably had a mention on these boards before. Also, as mountains go it's not the biggest out there but I think it fits the thread title nicely.

On the evening of Midsummers Day 1745, a line of marching troops, cavalry and even carriages was seen travelling along the summit ridge of Souther Fell. The ground over which they appeared to move was known to be too steep for such transport, but the procession continued unabated for some hours until night fell, constantly appearing at one end of the ridge and disappearing at the other.

26 sober and respected witnesses were assembled to view the proceedings and later testified on oath to what they had seen. The next day Souther Fell was climbed and not a footprint was found on the soft ground of the ridge.

One scientific explanation offered was that this was some bizarre mirage or reflection of the army of Bonnie Prince Charlie, that day exercising on the Scottish coast, while another explanation suggests that the sighting was originally misidentifying the smoke from Germanic bonfire rituals, with the story of the "Spectral Army" evolving over the years through transmission and adaptation in the popular press.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther_Fell#The_.22Spectral_Army.22_of_Souther_Fell
 
many years ago when i used to listen to bbc radio 5 (i refuse to use the LIVE!) there was an interview with a mountain climber, he stated he was up a mountain in south america when at night he heard what was to him the sound of children crying and screaming, when he got back down the mountain he was told there had been a school in the valley below the mountain, but the school had been destroyed in a landslide.....
 
titchagain said:
many years ago when i used to listen to bbc radio 5 (i refuse to use the LIVE!) there was an interview with a mountain climber, he stated he was up a mountain in south america when at night he heard what was to him the sound of children crying and screaming, when he got back down the mountain he was told there had been a school in the valley below the mountain, but the school had been destroyed in a landslide.....
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That got me thinking of the Aberfan disaster and, sure enough, there are some Fortean-related accounts around that:

http://www.67notout.com/2010/03/dreams-and-precognition-of-aberfan.html
 
davidplankton said:
Really looks like a haunted outdoors jacket floating in mid air.
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Looking at that pic, the positioning of his right arm looks like he was taking a selfie .. so his friend could have been looking the other way when a bin bag blew past or something similar .... I really like this pic though, the grain on the pic is consistent with the distance of everything else normal looking captured at that distance in his pic.
 
davidplankton said:
Really looks like a haunted outdoors jacket floating in mid air.
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Indeed. The fact that, on zooming in, the leg area of the apparition seems either non-existent or possibly semi-transparent adds to the creepiness.
It made me think of a snippet of poetry from Coleridge: "And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend. Doth close behind him tread.”
Wonder if the climber thinks twice about taking selfies now, in case his "stalker" crops up again (and maybe a bit closer)!
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
A recent classic "I swear there was no-one there when I took the photo" case from a mountain in Northern Ireland...
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As someone who has quite a lot of times for ghosts, but not for ghost photographs - I actually quite like this one.

davidplankton said:
Really looks like a haunted outdoors jacket floating in mid air.
Click to expand...

My first thought was that it looked like military style poncho with the hood up - the back bulged due to the wearer carrying a pack underneath. And, zooming in a little (although the resolution makes it hard to tell with any certainty), I think the appearance of floating may be caused by the lower legs being behind rock debris.

As to there being no-one around when the photograph was taken - I have to say I am always sceptical when I come across this statement; we are, generally speaking, quite poor observers of our environment - atrociously so when viewing that environment in retrospect. However, I would expect experienced walkers used to working their way around sometimes dangerous environments in hazardous conditions to be better than most – but then again, the very need to focus on certain elements may make other less immediately important factors less noticeable.

Another possibility that struck me is that if this is, as it appears to be, the Mourne Wall area of Slieve Donard then you might not necessarily be aware of another walker if, although relatively very close, they were the other side of the wall. (The wall itself is not terribly high - but if you or those on the other side were walking a little away from it, on slightly lower ground, it would obscure you from each other.) The low cloud evident in the photograph would also dampen the higher frequency sounds that often give us a clue that someone is about*. And there are various crossing places where that unknown walker might quite suddenly appear on your side of the wall without you having been aware that anyone else was about.

All of that said - it has been the site of pilgrimage, probably going back way beyond the Christian era. So who knows - plenty of hoodie wearers back then.

*There seems to be some argument about this online - but I wonder if the confusion is down to a lack of clarity about the difference between being inside low cloud and being beneath it. My experience would be that high frequency sounds seem impeded when you are actually inside moisture laden air, but may actually seem more acute when you are beneath low cloud. I might well be totally wrong – our very own physics teacher/sea-dog Rynner will probably know more about this.
 
As a youngster I frequently visited relatives who lived deep in the Allegheny mountains. I'm no youngster today pushing 80 so I remember the primitive living conditions of those far away places where "The Devil bid the owl goodbye". Having no electrical contrivances, our people lived from sun-up to sun down using only the light of a fireplace fire or the occasional luxery of the keroscene lamp to light your way about the house or out to the out house. Most youngsters today cannot believe such conditions existed so close to today. But they did.Ghost tales were often told late in the evening, The soinners of these tales would usually end off with, "And that's a true story" or "That's a ghost tale I heard as a kid mabbe its true or mabbe not."
Two tales I emember that were told and sworn to be true I still remember after almost 70 years since heard them.
My grandfather was a great one to buy all of the land he could lay his hands on. One rather large parcel of ground he aquired had an old weather beaten house sitting on it. The old man, Abner, I think his name was lived his entire 80 odd years in that place and died there. The house then sat empty and grandfather bought the land and simply farmed around the old structure. One especially wet spring, it was decided to burn the house down, fill in the basement and farm over it; rather than continue to farm around it. So grandfather, his four boys by his second marriage and some neighbors set to do the deed. His wife of the second brood (My stepgrandmother) was on hand with food and water for the fire bugs. I didn't see the burning of the house; but I sure heard about it. My step grandmother came into grandfathers house in a a panic. Said as soon as that house caught fire reat good she could see old Abner, a sittin in his rockin chair by the fireplace just as plain as day, just a rockin away as the house burned down around him. I have no idea what see saw or thought she saw but at the state of near hysteria she was in she definitely THOUGHT she saw old Abner rocking in his chair while the house burnt down. Keep in mind, old Abner, had been dead several years.
The second story involved lights. One summer, at the house of a distant cousin, we sat on the rear porch and looked across the way at a rather close tall hill (some said "mountain". "Yessir, my cousin continued, We watched that danged light appear every night for most of a month. Heck yer cousin Paul even took his horse after that light to see what was makin it shine. He never even got close to it, he said. That danged light would just keep a drawing you along til you were plum wore out and you never could find its source." "Then about three or so weeks after it appeared we'uns were sittin here on this here porch awatching that dang light bob along up there when a second light started a climbing up toward it. Those two lights met up there in that there notch and disappeared. Never saw em again." An uncle of mine suggested "Foxfire". But my cousin said he'd seen Foxfire before and it sure never acted like that."
I suspect there are or at least were some mighty interesting tales in those lonely hills but rado TV and computers are quickly eradicating them.
 
David Plankton said:
This story seems a bit tame compared to the real life horrors of Everest mentioned above and it's probably had a mention on these boards before. Also, as mountains go it's not the biggest out there but I think it fits the thread title nicely.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souther_Fell#The_.22Spectral_Army.22_of_Souther_Fell
Click to expand...

Just to add to the real-life horrors of Everest, unseasonably warm temperatures are melting the ice and some of the 300 or so long-dead bodies are "coming out" :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...elting-glaciers-exposing-bodies-dead-climbers
 
This is an interesting thread. Allow me to add that the Chinese have their "Classic of Mountains and Seas"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas
Which details all manner of supernatural creatures who inhabit the various peaks. Some are ghosts, some are of divine origin, some are devils, some are merely remarkable beasts and so forth. This is a lot like the Roman idea of the Genuis Locii. The tradition of sacrificing someone to a place so that their spirit would act as a guardian is also very widespread. Take for example Medieval Japan's hitobashira LINK.

This puts me in mind of the story of Bran the Blessed LINK, who used his magic to defend Britannia and how King Arthur dug up his head, and declared that henceforth the job of protecting Britannia would fall to men,. but Arthur in his turn was laid to rest as Britannia's new mythic guardian, almost like the renewal of an ancient pact.

Now obviously this has drifted away from mountain spirits, but it is not hard to see how huge and magestic places like mountains that have such a powerful emotional effect on humans have become a magnet for folklore. They would also be a good hiding place for cryptids.
 
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